The Ironclad Covenant (Sam Reilly Book 10)

by Christopher Cartwright

  “Yeah.”

  “What did she say?”

  Virginia tensed and then swallowed hard as she recalled the woman’s words that all of a sudden now seemed so important. She checked the handwritten note she’d made for her own paperwork, just to make certain she got it right.

  She then met the detective’s accusatory eyes, and said, “Thank God it’s finally over.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was well after dark when they cleared the hospital for the last time that day. The twelve-hour shift had turned into fourteen, when right before finish time, a severe asthma case dropped in which took them every bit of energy they could muster – and nearly two hours to complete. They saved the girl, but now Virginia and Anton were bone-tired weary.

  Virginia was crumpled in the passenger seat, enjoying the chill from the glass with her head resting against the window as the skyline blurred past. Neither one of them talked for several minutes, and they were being overtaken by about half the traffic which pulsed around them with far more urgency than either could summon, both hovering in the familiar state of near total exhaustion. Images from the day drifted through Virginia’s mind as she tucked her knees up against the dash and tried to melt into the unforgiving vinyl seat. Anton stared at the road ahead, but noticing his partner looking over he gave a convincing half smile.

  “How’s it going with your Dad?” Anton asked.

  Her lips curled into a thin-lipped smile that took effort. “It’s definitely spread into his spinal cord, so yeah not great.”

  “Man, that sucks. Did you hear back from the Swiss drug trial people?”

  “Yeah, they said they have a clinic in Palm Springs, California. Better still, he’s a great candidate and they’ve had 100% success rates so far in the trial with patients with the same kind of cancer.”

  “That’s great news. How do you get him on the trial?”

  "Four hundred grand.”

  “Wow. You have to pay? I thought they were still in the trial stage, shouldn’t they pay him to be their Guinea pig?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Apparently, the issue is in the costing. They say the procedure’s expensive and the trial simply wouldn’t have the funding to go ahead without participant’s fee.”

  “Of four hundred grand.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Right. Any ideas?” Anton asked, his tone intimating he knew the answer full well, but eager to allow Virginia the opportunity to vent her frustration. He was a good partner and knew what was required of him.

  “Anton, I could sell my house, my car and cash in all of my 401 retirement plan, and I still wouldn’t have that sort of money.”

  “Did you tell them you’re a veteran and a NYFD paramedic?”

  “I wrote to them.”

  “And?”

  “They said at this time they’re fiscally unable to fund unsupported positions in the trial.”

  “So basically, the rich get the cure for cancer and the rest of us get to die?” Anton snarled.

  “That seems to be the gist of it.”

  “Yeah well that sucks.”

  “Yeah, it sure does.”

  Anton drove into the fire house and they cleaned up the ambulance, restocking it and preparing it for the next day. Virginia was just locking up the van when Anton pulled across the plant room in his three-year-old Mustang GT and reached out for the roller door button on the wall.

  “Did you hang your keys up, Anton?”

  “Yep, already done. No reason to stay a minute longer than you have to at this place.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll be out the door right behind you.” Virginia smiled. She had once felt the same way. But now, with her father the way he was, she preferred being at work than seeing him the way he’d become.

  “Thanks for a good day, I’ll see you back here for another one in the morning.”

  “Yeah, you too,” she replied. “Try to stay awake on the way home. I’ll message you a sign-off time after I do my timesheet.”

  “Hey, Virginia.”

  “What?”

  “If I had the four hundred grand…”

  “I know. Thank you.”

  “Let me know if you need anything.”

  She smiled. “Thanks, Anton.”

  The station phone started ringing. There was only one possible caller, the dispatch center. It was a secured line.

  Anton turned his head toward the phone mounted on the wall of the station. It kept ringing. “Virginia.... No.”

  “It might be important…”

  “Of course it’s important! Someone rang for an ambulance!” Anton raced the rumbling V8, temporarily drowning out the ring of the phone. “See ya tomorrow!” he yelled out the window as he peeled out the roller door and into the street.

  Virginia sighed. She really needed to get back to her father and see if he needed anything. That’s what she was supposed to do. She’d spent her life helping others, why couldn’t she just go home and be with her father? Was it because she couldn’t face the fact that she couldn’t do anything to save him?

  She walked over to the phone. “Central, this is Beaumont.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Virginia, it’s Peter,” came the familiar voice of the radio despatcher. “Is Anton still there?”

  “Just driving out the door as we speak.”

  “Can you stop him?”

  “Not a chance in hell.”

  “Look. I’ve got a 28-year-old cardiac arrest I can’t cover. It’s about half a mile from the station, and the next closest is at 42nd street tidying up a non-transport but can’t leave yet. Can you help me out? I wouldn’t ask, but it’s an emergency.”

  “Peter it’s two hours and forty minutes into overtime already, I'm exhausted.”

  “I’ll write you up for a midnight sign off. That’s four hours overtime pay and you should be on your way home by eleven at the latest. I wouldn't normally ask but I've got no coverage at all right now.”

  Virginia made a noise as she breathed out. “All right, all right. Midnight sign off?”

  “Right. Thanks Virginia. You’re my new personal hero.”

  “Yeah right. I’ll jump back in 326, okay, same portable radio numbers as today.”

  “Great.”

  Virginia looked down and realized she was still holding the keys in her right hand from when she had parked the van a minute ago. In disbelief she hung up the now empty receiver, and unlocked the van again.

  She turned the key, sat down and cranked forward the driver’s seat, and the job lit up on the mobile data screen. The computer’s alarm chimed urging her to mark the van as responding before she could open up the details of the case. It was to an address she knew well, public housing, probably ground floor unit judging by the number. She could have almost driven there with her eyes closed.

  She grabbed the radio mike, and for the benefit of the other crews more than anything else she voiced the job, “326 dayshift responding hot to 892 – 896 Franklin for the unconscious query arrest. Responding single.”

  “Thanks again, 326,” the dispatcher replied. “I’ll get you some back up as quickly as I can.”

  Virginia switched the lights and sirens on and joined the traffic. She weaved in and out. She was driving hard, alternating between heavy braking and hard acceleration – after all, she was on her way to a twenty-eight-year-old cardiac arrest victim and some emergencies are more critical than others.

  Blue and red lights reflected off the buildings and the emergency strobe lights shot into the traffic up ahead. She reached sixty miles an hour, and something stirred in her subconscious. A sixth sense, developed over nearly sixteen years of service as a paramedic and highly attuned to pick up the little things that didn’t make sense, was trying to warn her there was something wrong about the case.

  What had happened to cause an otherwise healthy twenty-eight year old’s heart to suddenly stop beating?

  Chapter Sixteen

  It never c
eased to amaze Virginia that no matter how long the shift or how bone-tired weary she was, there was always the clear-eyed, sharpness of mind that returned to her on the way to a critical patient, especially if she was on her own.

  Red and blue lights flickered and glinted all around her as the engine roared beneath the steering wheel. The wail and yelp of the siren smothered everything audible and Virginia visualized and then committed to the route she would take. Familiar sensations of the body systems gearing up inside her were distracting as adrenaline coursed into her body. She calmed her mind by assessing the sensations individually, and rationalizing them away. The tingle at the kidneys that resonated right down to the deepest core of her gut. The involuntary deep breath as her cardiovascular system started to feed oxygen to the tissues of the body in primal preparation for the battle ahead. She enjoyed the fear in her. This was what had kept her in the job. This was what made Virginia Beaumont tick.

  She entered the street and killed the noise of the siren, followed by the lights of the beacons. Finding the driveway, she pulled up into the cramped parking lot and squinted to study the red brick building, using the powerful sidelights fixed to the ambulance. Sometimes she could get a good sense of what was inside from what lay on the porch or in the yard, and this complex had all the hallmarks of a certain type of clientele. Children's toys and the discarded remains of whitegoods and most of a shopping cart lay undisturbed on the tufty unkempt grass.

  Taking in the scene, she shouldered an oxygen kit and strong-armed the two other medical kits through a squeaking, heavily rusted gate, and crossed the no-man’s-land grassed yard to the door. The glass and aluminum door stood propped open with the top half of a broken baby stroller. Even in the cold, the musty air smothered her senses momentarily. The hallway was long and dark. Taking her mini flashlight off her belt, Virginia shined around for a light, and found a timed night light button near the door. Worn, it popped straight back out when she pushed it in.

  She muttered while holding it in and craned her neck to see the details of the hallway, and any unit numbers. The door at the end of the hall on the right was ajar. Palming her flashlight, she picked up the kits and headed in.

  “Ambulance!” she called out as she approached the door.

  “Paramedics! Anyone home?” Virginia nudged the door with her kit, but hung back before the threshold, keeping her feet in the hallway. There were no neighbor's doors opening, the only light was flashing from the buzzing florescent on the exit sign above the door where she entered, and it seemed far away at that moment. It was quiet. She didn’t like it, and hated not having her partner there.

  The alarm bells of her sixth sense kept ringing – something’s not right.

  Virginia placed her kits on the concrete hallway and used her flashlight to peer into the darkness inside the unit. She took the radio mike from her left epaulette in a wide pinch with her right hand and depressed the button. “Three – twenty – six to Central.”

  “Go ahead three – two – six.”

  “Thanks, Central. I’m at the given location at 9 of 118 Nostrand Avenue and the unit is in darkness but I have access. What’s the ETA on the backup car?”

  “Stand by twenty-six. Central calling nine seventy, nine-seventy are you on the air?”

  “Nine-seventy,” crackled the reply.

  “What’s your ETA to clear and back up the single in Bed-Stuy?”

  “We still need a few minutes here Central, five to ten and we’ll be on it.”

  “Two-six did you copy?” Scratched the dispatcher’s voice through the speaker

  “Understood. Stand by for a report.”

  “Ambulance!” Virginia called into the unit. “I’m coming inside now!”

  From the doorway she could see the back of a three-seater sofa which was doing a pretty good job of obscuring the entry. Behind that was the much-too-big –for-this-room TV set sitting on a sideboard which also housed an imitation samurai sword rack amongst empty soda cans and other receptacles which now doubled as ashtrays. A bedroom door was open and visible to the right of the TV up a short hallway, and to the left was a kitchenette, utterly devoid of any clear surface space. Food containers and dishes piled from the sink and spilled to the benches and the overflowing trash nearby. The room had the familiar stink of cigarette ash and mildew.

  “Hello? Ambulance! Anyone here?”

  No one was in the living room and kitchen.

  Virginia found the light switches behind the TV set and to her surprise lights blazed on in both rooms. She moved to the bedroom and found the man. He was little more than a boy really. Certainly not twenty-eight, twenty years old seemed a stretch. He was dead as dead can be. Laying in sneakers, dirty jeans and a black t-shirt on his bed, mouth open with dark doll’s eyes staring up at the roof.

  The bedside was a coffee table cluttered with empty pharmaceutical packet strips, cigarette butts stuck into beer can lids, empty drink bottles and candy wrappers. There was a lady’s belt tied loosely around the boy’s left arm, and on the quilt near his right hand a spoon and disposable hypodermic needle with its plunger right to the bottom. For the second time today, Virginia felt the cold skin of death at the young man’s neck through her gloves.

  Virginia turned to keep one eye on the door and pinched the radio mike “Three-twenty-six to Central.”

  “Central, go ahead twenty-six”

  “You can cancel the backup car and start the Police instead. Patient’s deceased”

  “Copy that, I’ll get them going for you.”

  Virginia stared at the dead man in front of her. He was barely more than a kid. On his left wrist was a gold Rolex. It might have been fake, but then again, if he was dealing the drugs, it might have been real. She shook her head. It was another needless death by someone who should have had an entire life ahead of him. Instead, the fool couldn’t keep his hands off his own merchandise.

  Taking in the room around her Virginia saw the duffle bag poking out from under the bed. It seemed out of place. New. Expensive heavy duty brushed steel zippers on thick navy-blue canvas. She turned her head and listened. Only the hum of the distant street. She withdrew the bag. It was heavy. Unzipping it she already knew what she was going to find. Cash. Bundles of hundreds in ten-thousand-dollar blocks. The bag was full of them. Probably fifty of them. Probably enough to pay for her father’s treatment. The gods were tormenting her. How could she live with herself if she took this money? How could she live with her father's death if she didn't?

  She depressed her transmit button on her radio. “Three-two-six to Central.”

  “Go ahead Twenty-Six.”

  She felt her heart pumping in her throat and her ears. “Can I please get an ETA on the police?”

  About a minute went by. “I’m sorry three-two-six. The Dees have been diverted to a shooting. You might be stuck there a while.”

  “Understood.”

  Virginia weighed it all up in a less than a minute, like it was the most important decision of her life. If she left the money now, it would be left to dwindle away in the police evidence storage in the off chance they would one day get to prosecute someone. Given that someone was now dead, it was unlikely anything good would come of it. It might be a decade before anyone ruled as much, and by then the money would have been forgotten about. If she stole the money, she was committing a serious crime and if caught, it would destroy the career she loved, and most likely see her behind bars for a long time.

  But if she got away with it, she might just get to pay for her father’s treatment.

  Virginia stared at the duffel bag. Her mouth set hard with the fatalistic decision and dogged determination, she started down a dangerous path. She needed to steal the money. Could she keep a secret for the rest of her life? A life of honesty and duty turned in seconds? Could she look at herself in the mirror and hold her head up high knowing what she’d done?

  Hell yeah!

  She made her decision with conviction, without even once stopping
to answer the question, if the kid had been dead for hours, then who called the ambulance?

  Chapter Seventeen

  Virginia moved quickly.

  If the adrenaline was pumping before, now it was a torrent. Her hands were shaking as she emptied the two medical kits onto the floor next to the dead man, as though she'd attempted to commence resuscitation. She then started to frantically shove bricks of cash into the empty resus bags.

  The seconds raced by.

  She filled both medical kits, but it seemed to barely make a dent in the pile of cash. How much money could there possibly be? She was hoping to shift the cash in one go, but now it was obvious that would be impossible. The thing with $10,000 bundles of cash was that they didn’t compress at all. They had been sealed tight, and like small bricks, they couldn’t be manipulated to squeeze into the bag once it was full.

  Virginia quickly zipped up the duffel bag. If the detectives arrived while she was still outside it would at least stop them from drawing their immediate attention to the money, where they might guess that she’d stolen the rest of it.

  She picked up the two medical kits. They felt noticeably heavier, but still easy enough to move. She glanced at the scene. There was a lot of medical equipment strewn across the bed. If another paramedic turned up, it would be obvious that something was wrong. There was no reason for her to have taken out all of the equipment and even less of a reason for her to put away her medical kits without packing some of it back in. If the detectives arrived, she would have to simply pretend that it was all disposable equipment – once only use – that she would pack up with her yellow medical waste bags.

  Virginia took a deep breath. There was no turning back now. She would either succeed or get caught and go to prison. All or nothing.

  She stepped out into the hallway, feeling thankful for its busted light, which shrouded her in darkness. Virginia turned her head to the right, scanning for a neighbor or friend to step out of one of the adjoining apartments. There weren’t any. She didn’t have much to worry about, people in this part of the neighborhood know to stay indoors when they see flashing blue and red lights of an emergency vehicle.